The Hacker News | #1 Trusted Source for Cybersecurity News — Index Page

Recently released NSA exploit from " The Shadow Brokers " leak that affects older versions of Cisco System firewalls can work against newer models as well. Dubbed ExtraBacon , the exploit was restricted to versions 8.4.(4) and earlier versions of Cisco's Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) – a line of firewalls designed to protect corporate, government networks and data centers. However, the exploit has now been expanded to 9.2.(4) after researchers from Hungary-based security consultancy SilentSignal were able to modify the code of ExtraBacon to make it work on a much newer version of Cisco's ASA software. Both Cisco and Fortinet have confirmed their firewalls are affected by exploits listed in the Shadow Brokers cache that contained a set of " cyber weapons " stolen from the Equation Group . The Equation Group is an elite hacking group tied to the NSA's offensive Tailored Access Operations (TAO) and linked to the previous infamous Regin and S...

A winning anonymous bidder bought 2,700 Bitcoins ( worth roughly $1.6 Million ) in an auction held by the United States Marshals Service ( USMS ) on Monday. The US government announced at the beginning of this month its plans to auction 2,719 Bitcoins that were seized during several criminal, civil and administrative cases like Silk Road. The US Marshals confirmed to CoinDesk that four bids were received in the auction that took place between 13:00 and 19:00 UTC on August 22. The majority of the Bitcoins in the auction were stemmed from investigations of the Silk Road online black marketplace. Included 2,719 Bitcoins in the auction were: Around 1,300 Bitcoins seized from a civil case related to Matthew Gillum, a Silk Road drug dealer, who was sentenced to nine years in prison in 2015. Only 2.8 Bitcoins directly came from Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht , who was found guilty of operating Silk Road for illegal goods and handed two life sentences . Some 65 Bitcoins came ...

If you are a fan of Unreal Tournament from Epic Games or ever have participated in discussions on the online forums run by Epic Games, you possibly need to change your forum password as soon as possible. It seems the Unreal Engine and its creators, Epic Games' forums have recently been compromised by an unknown hacker or a group of hackers, who have stolen more than 800,000 forum accounts with over half a Million from the Unreal Engine's forums alone. The hackers get their hands on the forum accounts by exploiting a known vulnerability resided in an outdated version of the vBulletin forum software, which allowed them to get access to the full database. Epic believes registration information that includes usernames, scrambled passwords, email addresses, dates of birth, IP addresses, and date of joining, may have been obtained in the attack. "We believe a recent Unreal Engine and Unreal Tournament forum compromise revealed email addresses and other data entered in...

I had the honor of hosting the first episode of the Xposure Podcast live from Xposure Summit 2025. And I couldn't have asked for a better kickoff panel: three cybersecurity leaders who don't just talk security, they live it. Let me introduce them. Alex Delay , CISO at IDB Bank, knows what it means to defend a highly regulated environment. Ben Mead , Director of Cybersecurity at Avidity Biosciences, brings a forward-thinking security perspective that reflects the innovation behind Avidity's targeted RNA therapeutics. Last but not least, Michael Francess , Director of Cybersecurity Advanced Threat at Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, leads the charge in protecting the franchise. Each brought a unique vantage point to a common challenge: applying Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) to complex production environments. Gartner made waves in 2023 with a bold prediction: organizations that prioritize CTEM will be three times less likely to be breached by 2026. But here's the kicker -...

If your webcam has stopped working after installing recently-released Microsoft's big Anniversary Update for Windows 10 , you are not alone. With some significant changes to improve Windows experience, Windows 10 Anniversary Update includes the support for webcams that has rendered a number of different webcams inoperable, causing serious issues for not only consumers but also the enterprise. The problem is that Microsoft added some new ways for applications to access webcams with Microsoft's new Windows Camera Frame Server, preventing webcams from using two particular compression formats—H.264 and MJPEG. Microsoft decided that the Camera Frame Server should only receive an uncompressed YUY2 encoding stream from the webcam, which is affecting far more devices than Microsoft expected, causing Millions of cameras to crash. This is the reason why your camera hangs, freezes, or simply not works when you try to do a video calling with your friend over Skype. Brad Sams of ...

Last week, a group calling itself " The Shadow Brokers " published what it said was a set of NSA "cyber weapons," including some working exploits for the Internet's most crucial network infrastructure, apparently stolen from the agency's Equation Group in 2013. Well, talking about the authenticity of those exploits, The Intercept published Friday a new set of documents from the Edward Snowden archive, which confirms that the files leaked by the Shadow Brokers contain authentic NSA software and hacking tools used to secretly infect computers worldwide. As I previously mentioned , the leaked documents revealed how the NSA was systematically spying on customers of big technology companies like Cisco, Fortinet, and Juniper for at least a decade. Hacking tools from The Shadow Brokers leak named ExtraBacon, EpicBanana, and JetPlow, contain exploits that can compromise Cisco firewall products including devices from the Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) li...

Another day, another bad news for Bitcoin users. A leading Bitcoin information site is warning users that an upcoming version of the Blockchain consolidation software and Bitcoin wallets could most likely be targeted by "state-sponsored attackers." Recently, one of the world's most popular cryptocurrency exchanges, Bitfinex, suffered a major hack that resulted in a loss of around $72 Million worth of Bitcoins . Now, Bitcoin.org, the website that hosts downloads for Bitcoin Core, posted a message on its website on Wednesday warning users that the next version of the Bitcoin Core wallet, one of the most popular bitcoin wallets used to store bitcoins, might be replaced with a malicious version of the software offered by government-backed hackers. Specifically, Chinese bitcoin users and services are encouraged to be vigilant " due to the origin of the attackers. " Bitcoin.org doesn't believe it has sufficient resources to defend against the attack. ...

Ever since the creation of online chat rooms and then social networking, people have changed the way they interact with their friends and associates. However, when it comes to anonymous chatting services, you don't even know what kinds of individuals you are dealing with. Sharing identifiable information about yourself with them could put you at risk of becoming a victim of stalking, harassment, identity theft, webcam blackmail, and even phishing scams. Have you heard of Omegle? The popular, free online anonymous chat service that allows you to chat with random strangers, without any registration. The service randomly pairs you in one-on-one chat window where you can chat anonymously over text or webcam. But, are your chats actually Anonymous? No, all your chats are recorded and saved by the service. So, if you have shared your personal details such as your name, phone number, or email address, with anyone over the service, you are no more anonymous. Even the websi...

'Microsoft loves Linux' and this has never been so true than now. Microsoft today made its PowerShell scripting language and command-line shell available to the open source developer community on GitHub under the permissive MIT license. The company has also launched alpha versions of PowerShell for Linux (specifically Red Hat, Ubuntu, and CentOS) and Mac OS X, in addition, of course, to Windows. Now, people can download binaries of the software, as well as access source code of the app from the new PowerShell GitHub page. "Users across Windows and Linux, current and new PowerShell users, even application developers can experience a rich interactive scripting language as well as a heterogeneous automation and configuration management that works well with your existing tools," Microsoft says in its blog post . "Your PowerShell skills are now even more marketable, and your Windows and Linux teams, who may have had to work separately, can now work toge...

You might have heard about the recent ongoing drama of NSA hack that has sparked a larger debate on the Internet concerning abilities of US intelligence agencies as well as their own security. Saturday morning the news broke that a mysterious group of hackers calling themselves "The Shadow Brokers" claimed it hacked an NSA-linked group and released some NSA hacking tools with a promise to sell more private "cyber weapons" to the highest bidder. The group dumped a bunch of private hacking tools from " Equation Group " – an elite cyber attack unit linked to the NSA – on GitHub and Tumblr. The Shadow Brokers hacking group has published the leaked data in two parts; one includes many hacking tools designed to inject malware into various servers and another encrypted file containing the "best files" that they made available for sale for 1 Million Bitcoins. However, GitHub deleted the files from its page, not due to any government pressur...

After TrueCrypt mysteriously discontinued itself, VeraCrypt became the most popular open source disk encryption software used by activists, journalists, and privacy conscious people. Due to the huge popularity of VeraCrypt, security researchers from the OSTIF ( The Open Source Technology Improvement Fund ) announced at the beginning of this month that it had agreed to audit VeraCrypt independently. Using funds donated by DuckDuckGo and VikingVPN, the OSTIC hired vulnerability researchers from QuarksLab to lead the audit, which would look for zero-day vulnerabilities and other security holes in VeraCrypt's code. Now, the most troubling part comes here: The OSTIF announced Saturday that its confidential PGP-encrypted communications with QuarkLabs about the security audit of VeraCrypt were mysteriously intercepted. "We have now had a total of four email messages disappear without a trace, stemming from multiple independent senders." the OSTIF said . "Not ...